Establishing an information architecture for a knowledge management system

In 2019, I joined a 4-person team tasked with implementing operational improvements for a $20 million contract with a branch of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) responsible for certifying health plans on the federal health exchanges. Although Confluence was used as a KMS to coordinate annual activities and IT projects, page traffic was low given the organization’s size and the volume of work tracked in Jira.

At the time, UX and human-centered design maturity was low, so I wore many hats—researcher, designer, and information architect. I started by piloting simple navigation updates on select pages to promote open collaboration and shift documentation away from personal drives. My pilot resulted in an 889% increase in page visitors, which led to my pilot growing into a 7-month initiative to adopt Confluence as the primary platform for organization-wide collaboration while improving its navigation and overall usability.

While initial expectations were focused on making pages “look nice,” I used Google Analytics data to make the case for user research and inform the information architecture framework to future-proof the KMS. I led focus groups, defined user personas, and conducted A/B usability tests to ensure the new structure aligned with how different members of the organization actually worked.

The project was a major success, resulting in a significant spike in user engagement within the Confluence space. The new framework also allowed our team to safely expand page creation permissions without compromising design or navigation consistency. Ultimately, the redesigned space became a gold standard for Confluence usage across sister CMS branches.